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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2012
Memory and its representations can reveal as much about a culture's sense of itself as they do about its past. Israeli critics have traced the ways in which representations of the Holocaust in their country's films reflect, among many other issues, Israeli culture's preoccupation with the construction of Israeli identity. According to one critic, the Holocaust survivor in films of the 1940s and 1950s embodied weakness and passivity: “all the traits that Israeli identity [was] meant to contrast.” In the 1970s, another critic suggests, films “read” the Holocaust from a “nationalist perspective…highlighting heroic resistance….” Thus, within a few decades, Israeli cinema seems to have represented in radically different ways—through the lens of the Holocaust—the intricacies of Israeli identity formation: first, by shaping memory in terms of the putative weaknesses of diaspora Jews, contrasting them with the strengths of the “new” Israeli Jew; and later, by emphasizing characteristics that linked heroic resisters with heroic Israelis.
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6. Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), xivGoogle Scholar. The whole question of memory, its uses and abuses, is brought most recently up to date in Suleiman, Susan Rubin, “History, Memory, and Moral Judgment in Documentary Film: On Marcel Ophuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbi,” in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, ed. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara and Karp, Jonathan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 353–80Google Scholar. Suleiman believes that the emphasis on memory has been “justly criticized” by recent theorists and historians “because it can lead not only to dogmatism and kitsch but to political instrumentalization” (355). However, she notes as well, like Shoshana Felman (quoted above), that “memory and memorialization continue to be central preoccupations in Europe and the United States; the ‘obsession with memory’…is not something that can be made to go away” (356).
7. E.g., his The Dress (Ha-simla, 1969), Observation on Acco (1975), Paratroopers (Masa‘ ’alunkot, 1977), Seamen's Strike (Ja Brechen, 1981), Fellow Travelers (Magesh ha-Kessef, 1983), and Nuzhat al Fuad (2006) are all set in Israel; four of these films—like his Streets of Yesterday (1989) located partly in Germany—are pointedly political: critical of Israel's training of its soldiers, its social policy toward its Arab citizens, its secret service, and its treatment of Jewish citizens who dissent from governmental decisions. Only Sheherazade's Tears (2006), set partly in Israel and partly in the Soviet Union, begins to consider the power of artistic performance to reconstruct troubled social relationships.
8. Personal communication from the director.
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15. As she draws attention to the uses of repetition in Don't Touch My Holocaust, Regine-Mihal Friedman also invokes Freud's classic essay that links repetition to mourning as well as later essays by Deleuze and Lacan that deepen and complicate the range of interpretive possibilities opened by this representational device.
16. Turner, Anthropology of Performance, 41.
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18. Performance theorist Dwight Conquergood describes the boundaries crossed in performance as “more like a membrane than a wall” in “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” Drama Review 46, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 145–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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26. Performance theorist Peggy Phelan objects to this power of documentary film to repeat the unrepeatable: “Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated,” she insists. “It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as ‘different,’” in Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 146Google Scholar.
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30. Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2Google Scholar. Again, Regine-Mihal Friedman, “Double Legacy,” 203–4, sharpens one's sense of the complexity of this kind of memory by invoking its analyses by other scholars like Marianne Hirsch, Saul Friedlander, and Larry Langer.
31. The German filmmaker is quoted in Santner, Eric's Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 68–69Google Scholar.
32. Though film and still photography are not identical, Sontag's insight would apply with equal power to both media. This quote is from On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), 15Google Scholar.
33. Santner, Stranded Objects, 72.
34. Suleiman, “History, Memory, and Moral Judgment,” 364.
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36. Perhaps two review essays on recent scholarship in the New York Review of Books will suggest the nature and scope of these changes; see, e.g., Anne Applebaum, “The Worst of the Madness,” November 11, 2010. http://nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness (accessed February 28, 2012); and Timothy Snyder, “A New Approach to the Holocaust” (June 23, 2011): 54–56.
37. Butler, Judith, “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. Eng, David L. and Kazanjian, David (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 468Google Scholar.
38. Walter Benjamin's phrase, quoted by Butler, “Afterword,” 471.